ICE Immersion Series

Artistic development beyond geographical borders and confinements of language

ICE Immersion Series are designed to bring students, writers, and creators from different disciplinary, professional, and national backgrounds. In this way, we seek to create a platform for the exchange of opinions and ideas, and for developing new artistic and authorial projects both individually and in connection with others. Our Immersion Series is a space devoted to cultural exchange and creation between members of the local community and the wider sphere of cultural practitioners of the Americas. This non-degree granting workshop series does not only impact individual participants, but also cultivates ongoing cultural and social networks and linkages.

ICE Immersion Series admits a maximum of 35 students who may be practitioners from various artistic backgrounds or individuals interested in experiencing the creative process through a multidisciplinary venture. Lecturers are selected following the core multidisciplinary idea of creative exchange behind ICE.

Our mandate is to create a space devoted to exchange and creation with members of the local community and the wider sphere of cultural practitioners of the Americas. Our immersion workshops not only impact individual participants, but also foster the creation of ongoing cultural and social networks and linkages.

ICE Immersive Series are:

Experiential: Ice Series are process driven: Participants are encouraged to create and to try things out, as learning happens in the process of doing.

Multidisciplinary and experiential: Ice Series bring together artist/lecturers working in a variety of fields.

Curatorial Structure Program: Every component of Ice Series is conceptualized and designed from a curatorial perspective. Thematic, aesthetic, political or cultural concerns will animate the choices of artists, projects, movements and disciplines.

Our Immersion Workshops

Film & Collectivity

As part of our series on Collectivity, Nicolás Pereda’s workshop will focus on the process of representation in filmmaking as a collective expression. Together with Nicolás Pereda, the group will draft a film that reflects on representation, reality, fiction and the possibility of transgressing film boundaries by ways of collaboration. You can watch the resulting experimental film here.

Nicolás Pereda is a filmmaker whose work explores the everyday through fractured and elliptical narratives using fiction and documentary tools. His work has been the subject of more than 25 retrospectives worldwide in venues such as Anthology Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, and TIFF Cinematheque. He has also presented his films in most major international film festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, and Toronto, as well as in galleries and museums like the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Guggenheim and MOMA in New York.

Margo Glantz

Music & Narrative

Our winter 2017 ICE Immersion Series, Narrative & Music, was conducted by Margo Glantz, a fundamental award-winning novelist. Margo explored the creative possibilities of blending genres and using music to construct narrrative work. Margo Glantz is one of the most relevant authors of contemporary literature, with more than twenty books published. She was recently awarded with the prestigious Alfonso Reyes Award. Canadian jazz pianist Ron Davis participated in this workshop.

Mario Bellatin

Art & Orthopaedics

The first ICE ImmersionSeries Art & Orthopaedics, conducted by Mario Bellatin, Susan Antebi and Daniel Canty explored the possibilities of art as a way to define concepts of the unique versus the standard.

Acclaimed novelist, Mario Bellatin (Perú, 1960) constantly challenges the boundaries of the written text and other artistic practices. Bellatin was born with a shortened arm and without a hand on his right side, due to a condition attributed to a failure of medical science.

Susan Antebi PhD (Boston, 1972), Director of the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Toronto and author of Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability, will share with ICE participants her exploration of the ethics and aesthetics of disability and embodiment in literature and other media.

Daniel Canty (Montreal, 1972), writer, filmmaker and publisher, will unfold the themes of his first book, Êtres Artificiels, a history of automata in American literature, to provide additional creative elements to ICE’s immersion work.

Participants of this series delved into the implications of orthopaedics and artistic expression.

Art & Annulment

Our second ICE immersion series explored annulment as a tool to explore the creative process in art. Gustavo Artigas (1970) conducted a three day immersion experience, focused on the suppression of elemental works of art to rediscover expression possibilities, as well as a way to challenge contemporary art mechanisms. Artigas’ work has examined complex social relationships by presenting situations, often rooted in disaster, which are structured as interventions, scenarios, interactive situations and games. His works have been shown in international forums such as the Venice Art Biennale, Havana Bienniale and Liverpool Bienniale. By suppressing elements of different works and reorganizing them in a particular manner, participants will unveil the works of art themselves. Like Rauschenberg did with de Kooning in 1953, the group will erase –in a sense- and reconstruct pieces of art to suppress its basic meaning and encounter new significance. Salvador Alanis (1964) is a writer, and one of the founders of the Institute for Creative Exchange.

Art & Collectivity

Our third ICE Immersion series was conducted by Public Studio and Eva-Lynn Jagoe and questioned our relationship with the collective. The workshop explored the impact of social networking, intentional communities, social justice movements, climate change activism and intimacy.

Francisco Goldman is the author of four novels and two books of non-fiction. His books have been translated into 16 languages. His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens (1993) won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction; his second novel, The Ordinary Seaman (1997) was a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the International AIMPAC Dublin Literary Award ; his non-fiction The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop (2014) won the Index on Censorship T. R. Fyvel Book Award, the WOLA/Duke Human Rights Book Award, was shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuscinski International Award for Literary Reportage; and the French translation of his novel Say Her Name (2011) won the Prix Femina Etranger. He is also the author of The Divine Husband: A Novel (2004), a finalist for The Believer Book Award and The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (2013) for which he was awarded the 2017 Blue Metropolis Premio Azul. He has also received the 2017 Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award, and was also elected thid year to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and has been a fellow at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, and a Berlin Fellow. His journalism and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, and many other publications. He teaches one semester a year at Trinity College, Hartford, Ct, where he is the Allan Smith Professor of Creative Writing and Literature, and spends the rest of the year in Mexico City, were he directs the Premio Aura Estrada.